Tailoring the electrostatic screening effect during field emission from hollow multiwalled carbon nanotube pillars

Abstract

Field emission from hollow pillars of multi wall carbon nanotubes show lower screening effect and their turn on field can be tailored by tuning the annular width of the pillars. Simulations show that the energy variation in the extracted electrons can be decreased by lowering the annular width of the hollow pillars; for the hollow pillars of 10 μm annular width the energy width is ∼0.5 eV, fourfold lower than the solid pillars. This can reduce further by reducing the annular width of the pillars paving the way forward for the monochromatic electron emission. © 2011 American Institute of Physics.